Chapter 17

Since it was still fairly early and I had time to kill, I decided to go by my parents’. I hadn’t visited since moving out and the last time I talked to Mom was days before the fire, so I figured I was due. They’d grown used to me going months without a phone call or an email when I’d been in New York City, but I knew my mom well enough to know that wouldn’t fly while I lived in the same town.

Besides, it would give Mom a chance to gloat about being right about the job with Orville.

I was surprised to see not only Dad’s truck in the driveway, since he’d normally be at the mine by now, but to see him under it.

“Should you be at work?” I asked, coming to stand next to his outstretched legs.

“Henry?” He said, pushing himself out from under the truck.

“Yeah. I was coming by to see Mom. Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine. Your mother is just worried about the pictures they took of my lungs and threw a fit until I took some of my leave time.”

“She’s inside mad that you’re out here working on the truck, isn’t she?” I asked.

Internally, I was a little concerned, but our relationship wasn’t really one where we’d talk about anything being wrong. I couldn’t remember Mom ever demanding he stay home sick, so whatever it was must be pretty serious.

“Of course. If it was up to her, I’d still be in bed acting like I was already dead,” he said, sounding legitimately angry.

“Something wrong with the truck?” I asked, changing the subject since he was getting a little heated about the subject of his health.

If he was sick, the last thing he should be doing is getting his blood pressure up. Of course, the second to last thing he should be doing was lying underneath a rusty old truck out in the summer sun, even if it wasn’t that hot yet. But it wasn’t like I’d have any more luck convincing him of that than Mom did.

“Just changing the oil. With everything going on, I got behind, especially with all the extra driving you did.”

I only borrowed his truck a handful of times, and drove Mom’s car more often than not, but I wasn’t going to get into that argument either.

“Do you need a hand?” I asked.

“Nah. I’m almost done. Go in and see your mother. It’ll give her something to do instead of pestering me.”

“Sure. Holler if you need anything.”

He just gave me a wave of the hand and slid back under the truck. I couldn’t help but shake my head. My dad was generally a good guy, always worked hard to provide for us and helped anyone who asked, but even when he was helping, he was as prickly as a cactus about it. I would say I was amazed he ever made friends, but I’d met most of them, and they were just as ornery as he was.

As he predicted, Mom was three steps away from the back door, arms folded, looking like I’d just tracked something in from the yard.

“That fool still under his truck?”

“If you mean Dad, yes. What happened at the doctor’s?”

“The scarring has spread to both lungs and the doctor said he’s gone from simple to complicated.”

Outside of coal country, most people would have needed further explanation, but black lung was common enough that most of us knew the language related to it by the time we were teenagers.

Simple black lung is what happens to most people who work under the ground long enough. Coal dust collects in their airways, scarring up the lungs and making it harder to breathe. It was generally livable, although it increased the chances of other lung-related diseases, which is why most miners were told to stop smoking when they got their first symptoms. Not that many did.

For those that managed not to die from lung cancer or heart failure, a frequent side effect of smokers with black lung, they sometimes progressed to complicated black lung. The main difference was the amount of scarring and black spots across the lungs. People with complicated black lung still had all the same stuff to worry about that they had when it was just simple black lung, but they also started having serious trouble keeping their oxygen levels up. Many ended up on constant supplemental oxygen or even ventilators when it got bad enough.

It wasn’t necessarily a death sentence. There were plenty of miners who’d been diagnosed complicated and continued to live for years afterward, pulling an oxygen tank behind them everywhere they went, but I couldn’t think of many who made it a decade after that diagnosis. That level of damage just opened them up to too many other diseases and left their body weakened from constantly fighting to survive.

“How far along is it? He seemed okay just now.”

“They said it’s progressed pretty far. For now, he’s okay if he’s up, but he starts coughing badly once he’s in his chair and has to get up every thirty minutes to walk around and get his breath back. They have him on a machine when he sleeps now; it sounds like I’m lying next to Darth Vader.”

Having to get oxygen while you sleep was usually one of the first steps. Of course, it varied widely how long it would take to get to the next step, especially if he stopped adding more dust on top of the rest of it.

“Is he going to retire?”

“No, stubborn old fool. He wants to finish out the year. He’s close to his pension vesting, and he wants all of it, like the money will do him much good if he’s dead.”

“You know he’s thinking about you,” I said, which was true.

Dad had always made it clear he didn’t want Mom to have to keep working when she retired, and he had no illusions that he’d outlive her. The Union had made sure the wives still got part of their husbands’ pensions after they passed, since so many of their members never made it far past retirement.

“Do you think I care about the money?” she asked, tears welling up in her eyes.

“No,” I said, stepping in and wrapping my arms around her. “I know it’s frustrating, and I know how stubborn he can be. Dad’s going to do what he wants to do. We both know that. Better to spend every moment with him we can, rather than being mad and fighting.”

She pushed me off and wiped away a tear before a laugh escaped in spite of herself.

“If I wanted reason, I would have called Reverend Dalton.”

“Dad wanted me to come in and tell you about my life, so I could distract you with my poor life choices.”

“What have you done now?” She asked, crossing her arms again.

“This time, it’s something you’re going to actually like. I just got back from the sheriff’s office. Orville offered me a job the other day and I went in and accepted it this morning.”

“Really?” She asked, all anger and frustration at my father suddenly gone. “So, you’re going to stay here?”

“Yes, well, maybe. He let me have a three-month trial period to see if I still want to do it or if I want to go off and be a teacher.”

“Good. I think once you start, you’ll find you like it. It’s not going to be like it was in New York City and you won’t have Terri to make things worse.”

“Maybe. I just don’t want to get locked down if I really hate it.”

“I heard you did really well doing the whole fire thing. Of course, it wouldn’t have killed you to call me and tell me you were okay after jumping out of a burning building.”

“Half the town came through to gawk after, so I assumed you already heard it from ten other people by the time EMS cleared me. Besides, Orville had talked me into running the investigation and I wanted to get a jump on it.”

“Next time consider at least phoning.”

“Sure,” I said, knowing I had had no intention of doing anything of the sort.

“So, what made you change your mind? You were dead set against it when I brought it up.”

“Well, part of it was the investigation into the fire. If the NYPD had been that interesting every day, I would probably still be there.”

“It’s not always going to be like that,” Mom said, incapable of not taking the opposite side of anything, even when, as she’d pointed out, working for Orville was her idea in the first place.

“I know, but I’ll be involved in more than just walking a beat, since there’s only three of us.”

“Okay, but you said that was part of the reason. What’s the other part?”

“Things are going really well with Rosita, but we were both kind of keeping each other at arm’s length until now. I want to make it something more permanent and see if we have something.”

“Necking behind the windmill at the put-put in Summersville isn’t exactly arm’s length,” she said.

My mouth literally dropped open. My mom had good sources and if it had been here in town, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but we were an hour away and as far as I knew, she didn’t have a whole gaggle of friends in Summersville.

“How could you possibly know about that?”

“Tammy Mason took her nieces up there to play and called as soon as she got back to tell me about how inappropriate my son was.”

“Tammy Mason needs to mind her own business.”

“So, you really like this girl?”

“I do. She’s smart, funny, doesn’t take shit from anyone, and is a really good person. I mean, she called to ask for your help in arranging a bake sale to support George Cooper in rebuilding his shop and fed all of the people volunteering their time for free. It’s not like she’s making a killing at the restaurant. She also gives unsold food to the food pantry every single day so they can serve it to anyone who’s hungry, and when she found out the food pantry might close, she started thinking about how she could run her own.”